Monthly Archives: March 2020

It may seem counterintuitive to watch big companies stepping up and hiring thousands of people as the coronavirus pandemic wreaks havoc on consumer demand in the United States.

But the numbers of companies opening their checkbooks is growing, in large part because it has to if critical business such as bringing food to supermarkets and delivering fast-food to homes is to be done during increasing quarantine situations. One of the latest mass hiring announcements comes from food and beverage giant PepsiCo (PEP).

The company said it will hire 6,000 full-time, full benefit workers across the U.S. in coming months. That adds to PepsiCos 90,000 strong workforce supporting its North American food and beverage businesses.

It [the hirings] will take pressure off the system and help relieve some of the much needed work that these individuals on the front-lines of our business are doing, explained PepsiCo North American Foods CEO Steven Williams on Yahoo Finances The First Trade. Williams also sought to reassure the public on food availability amid an explosion of photos on social media showing empty shelves of steak, chicken and pasta.

The U.S. food chain is incredible there is no shortage of supply in most food categories. Our sites are running 24/7, Williams, a 23-year veteran of PepsiCo, said.

PepsiCo isnt alone in the hiring push.

(Photo by Will Lester/MediaNews Group/Inland Valley Daily Bulletin via Getty Images)

Papa Johns said Monday its looking to hire 20,000 workers as its business experiences a pick-up with people ordering from home and sit-down eateries closed by state governments.

The industry is changing dramatically right now, where a lot of my peers that run dine-in restaurants are being asked to close their dining rooms and I feel really bad for them from a business standpoint. But from a community standpoint I feel its our responsibility that has more of a delivery model to pick up the slack and make sure the communities we live and work in have the food they need to get through this situation, Papa Johns CEO Rob Lynch said on The First Trade days before the hiring news became public.

Papa Johns rival Dominos Pizza is hiring 10,000 extra workers.

Meanwhile, CVS Health is looking to add 50,000 full-time and part-time workers to meed an influx of those sickened by coronavirus.

Despite the hirings, the U.S. jobs market is expected to take a severe hit in coming months from coronavirus aftershocks. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard issued one of the more dire forecasts yet, predicting the U.S. jobless rate may soar to 30%.

Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and co-anchor of The First Trade at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.

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Why PepsiCo is hiring 6,000 full-time US workers during the coronavirus pandemic - Yahoo Money

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) seems to think that if given the choice, Americans 70 and over would be willing to risk getting coronavirus and possibly dying if it means stores re-open and the economy rebounds.

On Fox News Monday night, Patrick lamented not being asked how he would balance protecting some of the people most at-risk for contracting coronavirus adults 65 and over while keeping businesses up and running. "No one reached out to me and said, as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?" he said. "If that's the exchange, I'm all in."

The 69-year-old kept going, saying that "those of us who are 70 plus, we'll take care of ourselves, but don't sacrifice the country." This declaration "doesn't make me noble or brave or anything like that," Patrick said, "I just think there's lots of grandparents out there like me ... what we all care about and what we love more than anything are those children and I want to live smart and see through this, but I don't want the whole country to be sacrificed, and that's what I see."

Host Tucker Carlson asked Patrick for clarification, wanting to make sure he really was saying that "this disease could take your life, but that's not the scariest thing to you, there's something that would be worse than dying." Patrick paused, possibly realizing that he just volunteered as tribute in The Hunger Games: Coronavirus Edition, then responded, "Yeah." Watch the video below.

More stories from theweek.comTrump, whose hotel business is losing millions, says 'I'll be the oversight' of $500 billion coronavirus 'slush fund'People are dying after self-medicating with unproven COVID-19 drug promoted by TrumpTrump suggests he might soon prioritize the economy over public health

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Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick thinks grandparents should be willing to sacrifice their lives to save the economy - Yahoo News

An Italian doctor treating patients at the center of the worst coronavirus outbreak in Europe has issued a stark warning to other countries yet to be hit by the full force of the pandemic: lock down.

"We know what happens," Dr. Emanuela Catenacci told British broadcaster Sky News as she took a break from treating patients in an intensive care ward in Cremona Hospital in Lombardy. "Don't think it is happening here and it can't happen everywhere else ... because it will."

The death toll in Italy jumped by 793 to 4,825 on Saturday, by far the largest daily rise in absolute terms since the contagion emerged in the country a month ago. Last week, the number of those killed in Italy's outbreak surpassed those who died in China, where the disease emerged late last year.

While Lombardy, the center of the Italian outbreak, has been under lockdown for weeks, the central government has been criticized for not having acted quickly or forcefully enough to stem the outbreak. On Saturday, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte described the crisis as the worst the country has faced since the end of World War II.

In the hospital in Cremona, east of Milan, Dr. Leonor Tamayo told Sky News, which, like NBC News, is owned by Comcast Corp., that the staff was being overwhelmed by a "tsunami" of patients.

The hospital has run out of space to store bodies and has been forced to keep them in a nearby church.

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Comparing the outbreak to a "war," she said: "We are here 12 hours a day. Only, we are going home for a few hours and come back here for the work, because we are here for the patients."

As they struggled to cope with a huge number of patients, doctors said they are trying to dispel the myth that only the elderly are dying from coronavirus-related illnesses.

"Fifty percent of our patients in the intensive care unit, which are the most severe patients, are over 65 years old," Dr. Antonio Pensenti, the head of the intensive care crisis unit in the northern region of Lombardy, said Saturday. "But that means that the other 50 percent of our patients are younger than 65."

Pensenti said his team was treating "quite a few" patients ages 20 to 30, who were in a "severe" condition like the older patients, although he added that the younger patients were "usually healthier and survived more."

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Taking further restrictive measures to stem the outbreak, Attilio Fontana, governor of Italy's Lombardy region, signed a new order Saturday imposing even more stringent restrictions on residents, banning outdoor exercise and implementing temperature checks at supermarkets and pharmacies.

Pharmacies, supermarkets, banks and public transport will continue to operate.

After the announcement, national Finance Minister Roberto Gualtieri wrote on his social media accounts that it was "a necessary decision" that could "save human lives."

On Sunday, the Russian military will start sending medical assistance to help Italy battle the coronavirus after receiving an order from President Vladimir Putin, Russia's Defense Ministry said in a statement, according to Reuters.

Putin spoke to Conte on Saturday, the Kremlin said in a statement, adding that Putin had offered his support and help in the form of mobile disinfection vehicles and specialists to aid the worst-hit Italian regions.

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Act now, Italian doctor at center of outbreak warns the world - Yahoo News

A health worker checks a patient's temperature at a COVID-19 screening station at Watts Health Center. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Michael Levitt, a Nobel laureate and Stanford biophysicist, began analyzing the number of COVID-19 cases worldwide in January and correctly calculated that China would get through the worst of its coronavirus outbreak long before many health experts had predicted.

Now he foresees a similar outcome in the United States and the rest of the world.

While many epidemiologists are warning of months, or even years, of massive social disruption and millions of deaths, Levitt says the data simply don't support such a dire scenario especially in areas where reasonable social distancing measures are in place.

"What we need is to control the panic," he said. In the grand scheme, "we're going to be fine."

Here's what Levitt noticed in China: On Jan. 31, the country had 46 new deaths due to the novel coronavirus, compared with 42 new deaths the day before.

Although the number of daily deaths had increased, the rate of that increase had begun to ease off. In his view, the fact that new cases were being identified at a slower rate was more telling than the number of new cases itself. It was an early sign that the trajectory of the outbreak had shifted.

Think of the outbreak as a car racing down an open highway, he said. Although the car is still gaining speed, it's not accelerating as rapidly as before.

This suggests that the rate of increase in the number of deaths will slow down even more over the next week, Levitt wrote in a report he sent to friends Feb. 1 that was widely shared on Chinese social media. And soon, he predicted, the number of deaths would be decreasing every day.

Three weeks later, Levitt told the China Daily News that the virus' rate of growth had peaked. He predicted that the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in China would end up around 80,000, with about 3,250 deaths.

This forecast turned out to be remarkably accurate: As of March 16, China had counted a total of 80,298 cases and 3,245 deaths in a nation of nearly 1.4 billion people where roughly 10 million die every year. The number of newly diagnosed patients has dropped to around 25 a day, with no cases of community spread reported since Wednesday.

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Now Levitt, who received the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing complex models of chemical systems, is seeing similar turning points in other nations, even those that did not instill the draconian isolation measures that China did.

He analyzed data from 78 countries that reported more than 50 newcases of COVID-19 every day and sees "signs of recovery" in many of them. He's not focusing on the total number ofcases in a country, but on the number of new cases identified every day and, especially, on the change in that number from one day to the next.

"Numbers are still noisy, but there are clear signs of slowed growth."

In South Korea, for example, newly confirmed cases are being added to the country's total each day, but the daily tally has dropped in recent weeks, remaining below 200. That suggests the outbreak there may be winding down.

In Iran, the number of newly confirmed COVID-19 cases per day remained relatively flat last week, going from 1,053 last Monday to 1,028 on Sunday. Although that's still a lot of new cases, Levitt said, the pattern suggests the outbreak there "is past the halfway mark."

Italy, on the other hand, looks like it's still on the upswing. In that country, the number of newly confirmed cases increased on most days this past week.

In places that have managed to recover from an initial outbreak, officials must still contend with the fact that the coronavirus may return. China is now fighting to stop new waves of infection coming in from places where the virus is spreading out of control. Other countries are bound to face the same problem.

Levitt acknowledges that his figures are messy and that the official case counts in many areas are too low because testing is spotty. But even with incomplete data, "a consistent decline means there's some factor at work that is not just noise in the numbers," he said.

In other words, as long as the reasons for the inaccurate case counts remain the same, it's still useful to compare them from one day to the next.

The trajectory of deaths backs up his findings, he said, since it follows the same basic trends as the new confirmed cases. So do data from outbreaks in confined environments, such as the one on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Out of 3,711 people on board, 712 were infected, and eight died.

This unintended experiment in coronavirus spread will help researchers estimate the number of fatalities that would occur in a fully infected population, Levitt said. For instance, the Diamond Princess data allowed him to estimate that being exposed to the new coronavirus doubles a person's risk of dying in the next two months. Most people have an extremely low risk of death in a two-month period, so that risk remains extremely low even when doubled.

Nicholas Reich, a biostatistician at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said the analysis was thought-provoking, if nothing else.

"Time will tell if Levitt's predictions are correct," Reich said. "I do think that having a wide diversity of experts bringing their perspectives to the table will help decision-makers navigate the very tricky decisions they will be facing in the upcoming weeks and months."

Levitt said he's in sync with those calling for strong measures to fight the outbreak. The social-distancing mandates are critical particularly the ban on large gatherings because the virus is so new that the population has no immunity to it, and a vaccine is still many months away. "This is not the time to go out drinking with your buddies," he said.

Getting vaccinated against the flu is important, too, because a coronavirus outbreak that strikes in the middle of a flu epidemic is much more likely to overwhelm hospitals and increases the odds that the coronavirus goes undetected. This was probably a factor in Italy, a country with a strong anti-vaccine movement, he said.

But he also blames the media for causing unnecessary panic by focusing on the relentless increase in the cumulative number of cases and spotlighting celebrities who contract the virus. By contrast, the flu has sickened 36 million Americans since September and killed an estimated 22,000, according to the CDC, but those deaths are largely unreported.

Levitt fears the public health measures that have shut down large swaths of the economy could cause their own health catastrophe, as lost jobs lead to poverty and hopelessness. Time and again, researchers have seen that suicide rates go up when the economy spirals down.

The virus can grow exponentially only when it is undetected and no one is acting to control it, Levitt said. That's what happened in South Korea last month, when it ripped through a closed-off cult that refused to report the illness.

"People need to be considered heroes for announcing they have this virus," he said.

The goal needs to be better early detection not just through testing but perhaps with body-temperature surveillance, which China is implementing and immediate social isolation.

While the COVID-19 fatality rate appears to be significantly higher than that of the flu, Levitt says it is, quite simply put, "not the end of the world."

"The real situation is not as nearly as terrible as they make it out to be," he said.

Dr. Loren Miller, a physician and infectious diseases researcher at the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, said it's premature to draw any conclusions either rosy or bleak about the course the pandemic will take.

"There's a lot of uncertainty right now," he said. "In China they nipped it in the bud in the nick of time. In the U.S. we might have, or we might not have. We just don't know."

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WASHINGTON Surgeon General Jerome Adams warned Monday that the coronavirus outbreak will worsen this week and said people across the country are not taking the threat seriously enough.

"I want America to understand this week, it's going to get bad," Adams said in an interview on the "TODAY" show.

The disease is spreading, he said, because many people especially young people are not abiding by guidance to stay at home and practice social distancing.

"Right now, there are not enough people out there who are taking this seriously," he said.

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Adams said young people are flocking to the beaches in California and people are still heading to the National Mall in Washington to view the cherry blossom trees that bloom each year. He warned that young people need to understand that they can contract COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and that they can be hospitalized and potentially die from it.

"Everyone needs to act as if they have the virus right now. So, test or no test, we need you to understand you could be spreading it to someone else. Or you could be getting it from someone else. Stay at home," he said.

Asked about growing pressure for President Donald Trump to use the Defense Production Act to force companies to mass produce critical supplies, Adams suggested that it's not necessary at this point.

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"Here's the thing that people don't understand. You don't need to compel someone to do something they are already doing," he said, adding that the administration is already working with companies like Honeywell and Hanes that are already producing large quantities of needed items.

"The other important point is that we're not going to ventilator our way out of this problem. We're not going to treat our way out of this problem," he said. "The way you stop the spread of an infectious disease like this is with mitigation measures and preventing people from getting it in the first place."

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'This week, it's going to get bad': Surgeon general says people need to take coronavirus seriously - Yahoo News

This is not the best time to check on your 401(k) account. The global coronavirus crisis has upended businesses and despite some drastic government action, the stock market is in shambles. After you reset your password to restore access, you will see nothing but very bad news.

The S&P 500 index (^GSPC) is down a coronary-inducing 31% off its February highs. That means if youre young and your 401(k) mostly has stocks (lets say you own S&P 500 index funds), youre probably down around 30%.

Read more: 401(k) plans and how they work

As you get older, financial advisers typically advise transitioning out of more volatile and risky assets like stocks and into the safety of bonds. For a retirement account like an IRA or a 401(k), younger people are very stock-heavy sometimes 100% invested in stocks, because they have a long way to go until theyll need the money and the market will have enough time to correct and move higher, which they almost always do.

If you have a five- or 10- or 15-year horizon, this is probably a blip in the road, said Great Hill Capital Chairman Thomas Hayes on Yahoo Finances The Ticker. You probably want to hang tight. If youre adding every single month, thats a good thing youre buying less expensively for the long-term.

For people at retirement age, the numbers are different its often 55% stocks and 45% bonds, but theres no hard allocation for everyone.

Some people also add real estate and cash to the asset allocation pie chart. (Getty Creative)

The point is, everyone usually chooses an asset allocation thats appropriate for their age, though many people do it via a target-date fund, which does it automatically. (You just give them your money, and they follow a glide path that unloads stock exposure slowly until you die.)

If you dont have a target date fund, its not automatic. Which brings us to probably the one reason you might want to peep your 401(k) if youre a long way from using it. The stock markets craziness could have completely thrown off your allocations. It might be time to rebalance.

One of the things that we like to do in these periods of dislocation is rebalance, said Hayes.

If youre trying to have your money 75% stocks and 25% bonds, but the stocks just got hammered 30%, you might be left with just 68% in stockswhich may not be where you want to be.

If youre looking long term, Hayes said, fixing your allocation when stocks fall means buying them inexpensively for the long term.

You may want to check in with your financial adviser and say does this make sense to rebalance some of the portfolio, Hayes said.

Rebalancing can be just as easy as exchanging one stock index fund for a bond index fund or selling a fund for cash. Most financial services platforms have a handy tool that can show you what your current allocations are.

Conversely, if your stocks are doing really well, your portfolio might hold 85% stocks, and need to swap a few of them out for bonds to get back to your target allocation.

Rebalancing, however, can be especially important for people close to retirement or in itpeople who will need to draw on their investments. Because stocks are more volatile, not planning properly and having a suboptimal asset allocation could mean being forced to sell when the market is low.

If youre coming up on retirement, definitely have a conversation with your financial adviser and have some things in safer positions so that you can have access to the income in the short term in the next 12, 24 some-odd months, Hayes said.

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Ethan Wolff-Mannis a writer at Yahoo Finance focusing on consumer issues, personal finance, retail, airlines, and more. Follow him on Twitter@ewolffmann.

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The one reason you might want to check your 401(k) - Yahoo Money

Commuters pack a subway train in Taipei, Taiwan, on Wednesday. (Paula Bronstein / Getty Images)

In January, as Singapore racked up the highest numbers of coronavirus infections outside China, an alarmed Shasta Grant searched for flights back home to Indianapolis.

The 44-year-old American writer, who moved to this island city-state with her family eight years ago, worried that their adopted home would be ravaged again by a runaway disease and that the school where her husband teaches and their 12-year-old son studies would be closed. She feared food shortages, overwhelmed hospitals and travel bans.

But her husband persuaded her not to flee. Two months later, Singapore and other Asian nations have largely corralled their outbreaks; meanwhile, the virus roars across North America and Europe, leaving Grant dumbstruck by how quickly the U.S. went from a distant spectator of the epidemic to one of its primary victims.

It feels very strange to say that I feel safer here than in my home country, Grant said. That sinking feeling that it was really going to get awful, that we were all going to get infected, that just didn't happen. Things never really got bad in Singapore, and obviously theyre a mess in America.

In Asian countries that initially faced the gravest risk from the coronavirus, the shambolic U.S. response to the pandemic has elicited confusion, horror and even a measure of pity. Suddenly, it seems, the U.S. is the basket case, an aloof, inward-looking power that had already weakened its alliances and failed to lead on global emergencies such as climate change, and now was shrinking in a crisis.

The U.S. was quick to restrict travel from China in the early weeks of the outbreak; now travelers from the U.S. and other Western countries are exporting a "second wave" of infections to China, Hong Kong and Singapore. President Trump, who once said the virus would disappear like a miracle, has watched it explode in California, Washington state and New York while vigilant testing and contact tracing brought it under control in Taiwan and South Korea.

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As commercial shutdowns and shelter-in-place orders grind life to a halt in the United States' biggest cities, restaurants, bars, shopping malls and subway trains have operated virtually without interruption in Singapore and Taipei, Taiwan the occasional mask and thermometer gun the only obvious signs of a pandemic. Emerging outbreaks in India and Indonesia, huge populations where little testing has been done, now worry experts more than China and its immediate surroundings.

Though the number of confirmed infections in the U.S. now exceeds 43,900, health experts warn that many more coronavirus cases are going unrecorded because of a scarcity of tests. Hospitals nationwide lack enough ventilators, beds and medication to treat an expected onslaught of critically ill patients.

Herv Lemahieu, an Asia expert at the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank, drew comparisons to Hurricane Katrina, another calamitous emergency response that laid bare the cracks in the U.S. political system and the widening inequities in American society.

That was the first time that the world saw images broadcast from the U.S. that resembled those of a developing country, and thats something that for most of us was surprising, Lemahieu said. These kinds of moments have a psychological impact on the way the U.S. is perceived abroad.

They are having a financial impact, too, as fears of a prolonged U.S. slump drag down Asian stock markets, threatening to plunge some of the worlds fastest-growing economies into recession.

This stock market fall is serious, said Freddy Lim, a legislator in Taiwan, where the stock exchange has lost 20% of its value over the last month. So we hope the U.S. will get this under control as soon as possible.

That the U.S. would look riskier in a pandemic than parts of Asia would have been unthinkable not long ago.

In 2002 and 2003, an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, killed almost 800 people nearly all in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore and erased an estimated $40 billion from the global economy. Aggressive public health measures helped stop the disease before it spread in the U.S., while chastened leaders in China and Singapore pledged to invest in health infrastructure and epidemic surveillance.

Although China initially concealed the extent of this coronavirus outbreak as it did with SARS the Communist Party swiftly blanketed the epicenter of the virus, Hubei province, in a draconian lockdown that the World Health Organization praised as extraordinary in slowing the virus.

Through a mixture of strict quarantining, contact tracing, temperature checks and diligent testing, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong also bought time for other governments to prepare.

Health officials say the U.S. and other Western governments failed to anticipate the coronavirus reaching their shores.

Just because Singapore or Hong Kong experienced SARS while other places didnt, theres still lessons to be learned, said Dale Fisher, a Singapore-based expert on infectious disease who traveled to China last month as part of a WHO-led mission. You dont have to be in a car accident to know that car accidents happen. Im saddened that the world couldnt use that lead time to prepare better.

Others were blunter.

Trump was saying this virus is no big deal, and now suddenly hes changed his tune, said PN Balji, a veteran Singaporean journalist and commentator. It shows a callous disregard for your own citizens and, to a certain extent, the world.

Taiwan, less than 90 miles from the Chinese mainland and visited by as many as 2,000 Chinese tourists daily, had recorded 195 infections as of Friday or roughly 1 in every 120,000 people, among the lowest rates of any of the more than 170 countries affected by the virus.

Compare that with the U.S., where 1 in 7,500 Americans has tested positive for the virus, add universal healthcare, and its easy to see why Taiwans president, Tsai Ing-wen, urged her citizens this week to stay in Taiwan because it was safer than traveling overseas.

Taiwan has a very robust health system, said ruling party lawmaker Lo Chih-cheng. This is one area where I think the U.S. can learn from Taiwan.

Sean Kramer, a 32-year-old from the Seattle area who teaches at a junior high school in Taiwan, said friends and relatives messaged him in January to ask whether hed be safe there. For a while, he considered flying home.

But then he watched the numbers of infections in China skyrocket while those in Taiwan stayed flat. He saw people on the street instinctively don masks, the Taiwanese administration roll out a succession of helpful messages and authorities quickly decide to extend Lunar New Year holidays for three extra weeks in February.

All the steps that appeared to Kramer like overreactions seemed to keep a lid on the epidemic. As the virus spreads across his home state, he tries to do his part for his family by logging on to Amazon from Taipei to buy masks and hand sanitizer for his sister in suburban Seattle.

We never got the whole lockdown status, so seeing everyone react at home now, I cant relate to their emotions or their fear, Kramer said. Thats the scary part for me as an American.

The U.S. stumbles have also thrown a lifeline to Chinese President Xi Jinping, who was facing a rare spasm of dissent at home following his governments initial attempts to paper over the outbreak in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei.

As the total number of infections for the rest of the world has soared past those in China, Beijing has gone on a diplomatic and humanitarian offensive, pledging masks and medical equipment to dozens of countries including the U.S. in a bid to regain its global standing. Last week, Chinese billionaire Jack Ma sent a shipment of 1 million masks and 500,000 coronavirus test kits to our friends in America.

Such moves and Trumps repeated references to the Chinese virus highlight how the outbreak has become yet another arena of competition between the two leading global powers. Both countries appear to be covering up their mishandling of the crisis, said Lemahieu of the Lowy Institute, who called the war of words pathetic and unappealing on both sides.

Yet many Asian leaders retain faith that the U.S. will get a handle on its outbreak once social distancing orders and ramped-up health measures take hold, allowing it to resume a position of leadership in the global response.

The United States has got enormous resources at its disposal, Singaporean Foreign Affairs Minister Vivian Balakrishnan told CNBC last week. Its a matter of getting it organized and getting it delivered. So lets wait and see. You know, I would never count the Americans out.

Special correspondent Ralph Jennings in Taipei contributed to this report.

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'A mess in America': Why Asia now looks safer than the U.S. in the coronavirus crisis - Yahoo News